


Muscle Memory

by unveiled



Series: Snippets [3]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-06
Updated: 2012-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 16:52:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven stands before a mirror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muscle Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [a da Vinci sketch](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com/post/17006506693/leonardo-da-vincis-study-of-hands-circa-1474).

Raven stands before a mirror and tilts Charles's face from side to side, up and down. Studies the stretch of his neck, the blue gleam of his eyes. It's perfect, and it's nothing like him. She ripples into a nameless woman she sees in a park, the one with a precisely-hemmed skirt and trim red lipstick, eating sandwiches with small, neat bites. Making them last.

She lifts her hands, imagining them holding egg sandwiches, a napkin spread across her lap. Ah. She has the woman's posture slightly wrong — her back could have been a line penciled with the aid of a ruler, no concession given to the grind of everyday work. A secretary? Or a teacher. No. Her hands are smooth and cared for, every movement perfectly calibrated for a purpose.

That's where she has Charles wrong, too. She changes back into his skin and gives herself time to look at his hands, remembering. Charles's hands are workhorses: strong and blunt-fingered. Masculine. They have little of the softness with which he clothes himself, but Raven remembers them soothing away fevers from her brows and steadying her own hand at the crook of his elbow. She remembers them dusty from mouldering pages, when Charles needs to look up how to dress a wound or sew a doll's dress.

She shifts into Sharon Xavier and sees her hands clutched around a glass, waiting for her desperation and loneliness to ebb with the burn of liquor. A moment's thought and she's Erik, his hands' gestures as sharp and hard as shards of hematite. A man in an alley wringing out a filthy shirt. A nurse cradling a newborn, practiced and sure.

Her form ripples back into blue, and Raven looks at herself. Only herself. She spreads her fingers apart until the extensors strain in protest — much later than a mere human. Her tendons are strong, she knows, and exceptionally flexible. She wonders if she's capable of assuming the form of a polydactyl, if there are still marvels in her body she's yet to unlock. Her hands have held a weapon with an intent to kill for the first time two months ago; she's lost count since. If there's another shapeshifter like her, what will he make of Mystique's hands? Will he see the history behind the arches of her hands?

She stares at herself in the mirror and stretches out her arms as wide as they can go, wider than the limits she once thought natural, feeling her ribcage expand. Her lungs breathe their fill. Free.


End file.
